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Clashes broke out this week between Syrian government forces and fighters led by an internationally wanted man at a camp in northern Syria’s Idlib province. French Extremist.
The clashes come at a delicate moment, as Syria’s interim authorities try to decide how to handle the presence of thousands islamic Foreign fighters in the country.
Foreign fighters join forces with Syrian rebels who oust former president bashar asad in a massive attack last year after nearly 14 years of civil war.
But now, as the country’s new leaders seek to foster new ties with the West, these foreign fighters have become a political liability. His appearance is widely unpopular Syrianparticularly religious minorities, who often consider them to be more extreme in their views than local Islamist groups.
Here’s what happened in the camp in Idlib and what might happen next.
Standoff with a camp of French fighters
Al-Fardan camp in rural area near Idlib Türkiye The border is home to a small number of French and francophone militants and their families.
Syria’s interior ministry said in a statement on Wednesday that internal security forces had surrounded the camp following complaints from residents about “serious violations”, including the recent abduction of a girl from her mother by an armed group led by a French national named Omar Diaby.
The statement said that when forces tried to persuade Diaby to surrender, he “refused, locked himself inside the camp, prevented civilians from leaving and began firing, inciting security personnel and terrorizing residents.”
SARI Global, a center that provides geopolitical and security analysis, said armed clashes broke out overnight from Tuesday to Wednesday and “heavy gunfire and drone strikes were reported inside the camp.”
It is not clear how many people were killed and how many were injured. Videos circulating on social media, apparently shot by camp residents, showed blasted walls and windows. One shows a group of women and children running for cover alongside an armed man.
Omar Diaby’s son, Djibril, appealed to Syrians in a video posted on social media on Wednesday, saying security forces were preparing to take over the camp and “we have families and children and orphans and women here, including elderly women.”
“We are your brothers, the immigrants who left their lands, their families and everything and came to help you when you were saying, ‘Where is the world? Where are the Arabs? Where is the Islamic nation?'” he said. “Now you’ve got a crush on us.”
Another group of foreign fighters – Uzbek militants – arrived in the area to prepare for the defense of the camp. Waseem Nasr, a senior research fellow at the Soufan Center, a New York-based think tank focused on security issues, said government forces halted their plans to attack the camp, fearing political consequences if women and children were killed.
Instead, the two sides reached an agreement under which Diaby agreed to hand over the camp’s heavy weapons.
History of Omar Diaby
The leader of the militants in the camp, Diaby, also known as Omar Omassan, is a Senegalese-born French citizen who is known for posting French-language jihadist recruitment videos on YouTube. France had issued an international arrest warrant against him in 2014.
In 2016, the US State Department designated him a terrorist, saying he had led a group of about 50 French fighters who joined the Nusra Front, al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria.
It added, “Diaby’s video has been credited as the main reason why so many French citizens have joined terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq.”
In 2015, Diaby faked his death and resurfaced the following year.
Despite aligning with the Nusra Front, Diaby later aligned with the group’s spinoff, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the terrorist group that controlled much of Syria’s northwest before Assad’s fall. Former HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa is now Syria’s interim president.
Nasr noted that HTS had imprisoned Diaby twice before Assad’s fall and forbade him from leading his militants as an independent unit, allowing them to fight only “as part of the ranks of another group that has an agreement with HTS.”
Big issue of foreign fighters
After civil war broke out in the country in 2011, foreign nationals arrived in Syria to fight on different sides.
Some joined the Islamic State group. Thousands of alleged foreign IS militants and their family members are still being held in camps and detention centers guarded by Kurdish-led forces in northeastern Syria.
Others joined various rebel factions in northwestern Syria, where many remain today, while some have been deployed to different parts of the country as part of the new national army since the fall of Assad.
Darren Khalifa, a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group, said that for HTS, “the presence of foreign fighters in areas under their control has always been a dilemma and a headache,” both because of friction with the fighters’ home countries and because many “Syrians are very unhappy with their presence.”
However, he said that because the group was dependent on the support of foreign fighters, it has been reluctant to launch wide-scale operations, which would “give the impression to ‘good’ foreign fighters – don’t quote – that HTS is turning against them,” he said.
Nasr said that Diaby’s situation is so “specific” that it cannot be considered an indication of how the Syrian government will handle the issue of foreign fighters. In general, the interim government has adopted a policy of incorporating foreign fighters into the new Syrian army, which Nasr said the West has accepted because there is no clear alternative.
“If you don’t let them join the army, when they fought for more than a decade to remove Assad from power in Syria, get married and have children, what will they do?” He said. “They will create problems for the new rulers of Damascus or create problems for their home countries, which nobody wants. Nobody wants them back.”